Related Posts ¬

I couldn’t really think up an appropriate incentive sketch that fit the them of today’s comic. So instead, I just did a few quick facial studies. Click here to vote and view them. You might get a kick out of it.

Quick note on the voting – you guys are a dynamo! Yesterday we were at number 8. I placed the call and you guys answered! Now we’re number 2. That’s amazing! Keep up the great work!

Having recently celebrated Labor Day and the “official/unofficial” conclusion of summer, industry big wigs are left to pour under the numbers and try to come up with the reason that this year’s crop of so-called blockbusters returned some of the lowest attendance figures in nearly 10 years.

Several among them will try to pin the blame on a diversified market where video games and satellite television are stiff competition for the Hollywood dream factory. But I don’t buy that jive.

A cynic like myself might be quick to point out the increasingly difficult conditions audiences must endure in order to even enjoy a movie these days. Trailers that give away the plots to movies, television commercials in front of the feature, rude people on cell phones, crying babies in rated “R” movies, exorbitant ticket and concession prices and over-all lousy service.

But the fact of the matter is, your average audience member will put up with quite a lot of the content is worth putting down the money and the time for.

Example: In the fall of 2003, when I was desperate to see Lost in Translation, the only theater showing it at the time was a small (yet ancient) art house called The Varsity just off campus from Drake University downtown. The conditions in this theater are deplorable. Some may argue that’s part of their charm. I argue these are people who don’t wear shoes in winter and consistently reek of patchouli.

But I digress. I sat on a busted seat with a spring up my ass while the image was out of frame for two hours. I complained, sure. But not nearly as loud as I would have if I were forced to sit in similar conditions and watch Nick Cannon in Underclassman.

My point? If the film is quality, the rest of those distractions don’t matter.

I don’t know if this will mean all that much to the majority of you, but I wanted to point you to an article I was interviewed for in The Des Moines Business Record. You can read it here.

As you might have guessed by the name of the periodical, it’s a local publication that focuses on the business happenings in the Greater Des Moines area. It’s significant that I was interviewed, however, because it’s a subscription-based publication that a lot of big shots in the city read. They cover a lot of what’s happening with companies like Principal Financial, Allied Insurance and Wells Fargo – who are all headquartered here. So it’s kind of interesting company I keep by being featured in their pages.

The article is about people in the Metro who have hobby web sites and have been able to turn a profit from them. I’m really proud of how it turned out and how I was represented. They even sent a photographer over to my house to take a few shots!

Anyway, I wanted to share it because it was significant to me to be taken seriously at the local level. Hopefully it’ll open a few doors when it comes time to promote the book and this is something I can use in my press kit to help me convince local retailers to pick up copies to sell in their stores.

It’s actually quite serendipitous timing because we were planning on contacting them once we had copies of the completed book in hand (which you can still order here!). We were going to make the rounds with the local media and pitch it to them as a human interest story of exactly this nature. Turns out that the author – through mutual acquaintances – found out about me first and the rest is history!